By Curtis Price

March 18, 2024

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Driving from Decatur, AL to Russellville an hour west, after the sprawl of Decatur’s Beltline, the highway soon turns rural. Every so often there are clumps of mobile homes in the distance that look somewhat like covered wagons and you can imagine the same sort of pioneer spirit here in rural Alabama, to live free and isolated in the country (although no too isolated because there’s a Walmart a few miles away.) A little before Mouton, a smear of two thousand residents bifurcated by the road, lies a graveyard of abandoned trailers looking like rusted, beached whales tangled all on top of each other. 

Soon, past Moulton, the territory becomes completely rural, full of coiffed pastures with grazing cows, eruptions of fields of bright yellow wildflowers, then back to pastures scattered among lots of undeveloped land. The houses become scarcer too and, except for the farmhouses, they fall into two categories, either upper-middle class mini-McMansions or trailers. Every so often, a black pond appears with a solitary snowy white egret stooping to fish among scraggly, bent reeds. About two-thirds of the way to Russellville, an oasis of sorts appears – a Dollar General and the Three Sisters gas station and mini-mart.  

The Three Sisters is aptly named. Two of them are in when I drop by, looking like Valkyries from a Thor movie, buxom, tall, with long blond braids down their backs – and some of the most outrageous inflated prices I have ever seen in the South. Past them a few miles, is an abandoned fresh vegetable shack. I stop to take pictures – and a Hispanic family pulls up asking me what I have for sale, even though the shack is half-collapsed and beaten down by years of abusive attention from the Southern sun.

 Russellville, about ten thousand people, is “Big Chicken” territory, part of a rural South dominated by poultry plants in the same way Detroit used to be by auto. Here, the major employer is Pilgrim’s Pride. The plant looms on the left as you head into Russellville, a massive, hulking complex in a gully slightly off route 24 that looks like an armada of invading alien spacecraft. 

 I like Russellville myself; the town radiates a faded, down-at-the-heel, blue-collar vibe, with peeling-paint wooden-frame houses on hills that I find attractive, and I would move there if I had the chance. (Here’s a link to a YouTube video that gives a good flavor of the town). 

Russellville’s major distinction, though, is not that it is liked by me, but that it is the Alabama city with the highest per capita Hispanic population, at 40%, a population lured from far-flung regions by poultry plant jobs. The Hispanic influence is everywhere in downtown Russellville, in the names of churches, the many Mexican restaurants, and barbershops.  

Hispanic migration in Russellville didn’t go without the attention of the local Klan, based in Red Bay, a tiny, lily-white town about 25 miles away near the Mississippi border. In 2006, the National Knights of the KKK branch in Red Bay held an anti-immigration March in downtown Russellville, with a dozen robed Klansman leading a ten-minute march of 50 to the Franklin County courthouse.

 There, the rally heard calls to “Let’s Get Rid of the Mexicans!” and “Send Them Back!” Interestingly, the Imperial Wizard warned the crowd that they want to take all the jobs and they want everyone out of America:” And I’m talking about blacks and whites, they want you out of here because they want this as their land” – probably the first time a Klansman has appealed to blacks to join with whites in common struggle.  

But this is tracking with changes in recent Klan strategy. As AP reporter Jay Reeves notes in a 2016 story on the Klan in Alabama and Mississippi, “KKK leader Brent Waller of the United Dixie White Knights in Mississippi said, stopping immigration – not blocking minority rights – is the Klan’s No. I issue today.” 

About 300-400 people attended the rally, but no one could tell who were curious onlookers and who were active supporters. (The Klan claimed 50 people signed membership cards.) The rally also drew counter-protestors including a woman who was quoted saying “I don’t think this kind of thing is what America really stands for. I support people who are working to feed their families.” 

Since 2006, the Klan presence has been muted. As far as I know, there haven’t been any anti-immigration rallies since a small one in 2016 in Russellville and a Klan-organized anti-George Floyd protest at the Courthouse in 2020 only attracted four Klansmen and a larger counter-protest. But the Klan in North Alabama, like elsewhere in the Deep South, can be likened to a microbial spore, nestled deep underground just waiting for the right conditions to thrive.